SHAYNE DARK

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His breastworks worthy of Wagner

Artist showing glorious orbs with a Las Vegas touch

Shayne Dark likes to work with tough, industry-grade material. You know, guy stuff — like Fibreglass ball bearings, body-fill compound, and aluminum. The 53-year-old artist lives with his wife out in the country, north of Kingston. Guy country.

Yet as part of the current pairing of exhibitions at Edward Day Gallery, Shayne Dark cares as much about women as any show in town.

The other show has another purpose entirely. Architectural Feelings , by painter Nada Sesar-Raffay, is an array of aggressively formed, acrylic canvases on which a smouldering red is vigorously crosshatched with pale blue, white, and yellow. The compulsive, seeming reiteration of so many elements from canvas to canvas indicates an artist on a mission, although what it may be is not entirely clear.

Shayne Dark is clear.

For starters, there's the ongoing reiteration of Dark's favourite shape, a number of half-circular forms, large and luminous as full moons. They're fixed on gallery walls to jut out rather like extra-large-size renderings of some of Madonna's bosom-defining glam get-ups.

Neither the Madonna reference nor that of the bosom is accidental. Dark thinks of himself as a materials-based artist. But after hearing some five years back that his sister-in-law was afflicted with breast cancer, "that became foremost in my thoughts," he says. "The breast shape is iconic."

Dark's bosoms are positively Wagnerian in their earth-mothering, operatic scale. To some viewers, they may suggest a lively early interest in Playboy on the artist's part.

To me, there's more of a pop-sculptural sensibility here than a sexual one. Each glorious orb is adorned in something entirely Las Vegas-y such as glittery ball bearings, or a brain-penetrating "ultra matt blue" colour. (Please note: I only got Playboy for its pictures, never for its articles.)

For all of that, the neatest piece in the show is neither breast-related, nor wall-mounted. Instead, it's "Quarter Round (2000)," a quarter circle drawn on the gallery floor and filled with ball bearings to make a glittery, metal-filled sandbox that's reflected ad infinitum by two triangular-shaped mirrors meeting at a 90-degree angle.

The late American artist Robert Smithson conceived of a similar corner-shaped reflecting work for placement on gallery floors. Dark's work is a lot more glamorous, as you might expect from someone with both Madonna and Richard Wagner on his mind.

PETER GODDARD VISUAL ARTS COLUMNIST - TORONTO STAR

Apr. 6, 2006. 01:00 AM